Frail
by Dragon of Dispair
Summary: "Sometimes, you never knew why, but some people just left a mark on you. The instant he'd read her name on the POW lists, he'd known he was going to try and save her." Jihad era. Revised 06-05-2011.


Summary: "Sometimes, you never knew why, but some people just left a mark on you. The instant he'd read her name on the POW lists, he'd known he was going to try and save her."

Warnings: Nothing specific, but it's still rated T/PG-13 for implied violence and adult concepts.

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**Frail**

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Dr. Nikolas - "Doctor" "Doc" "Nik" or "Dr. Nik" - Kasyanov did not look like an active member of one of the most successful intelligence agencies in Known Space. Which was, of course, entirely the point. For a moment, he contemplated his appearance in the glass. Brown hair had long since faded to grey, and three days' worth of stubble completed the scruffy image. What he looked like was a grizzled old ex- explorer/medic out of some Periphery world too backwater for anyone to bother remembering.

Well, you know what they say about truth and lies.

Which didn't mean he _wasn't_ an active member of one of the most successful... etc...

His reflection stared back at him, green eyes asking why he was doing this. Depending on what he found, he could be reprimanded, lose his comission and job, or even be jailed himself. And that was discounting the possibility of physical injuries. Why he was doing this was a question he'd asked himself dozens of times. The answer wasn't anymore satisfying this time. He removed his glasses, wiping them clean, and when he replaced them, he resolutely focussed beyond his reflection.

The one way mirror took up one wall of the cell he now looked into. It was mercilessly well-lit, leaving no place to hide. The metal walls gleamed, and there was nothing within a prisoner could turn into a weapon or tool. The palet was simply an alcove inset into the far wall. A screen "hid" a sink and toilet from the mirror and the door, but it was so sheer the privacy it afforded was more illusion than fact. A chair was bolted to the floor, for interrogations. It was the highest security cell that could be found. The metal door and walls were as thick as a dropship's bulkhead and the prisoner was watched at all times by the mirror and the cameras in the corners of the room.

And maybe it was her presence in this particular cell, but the woman within, unlike Nik, looked exactly like what she was: dangerous.

He and the jailor watched her pace the room like a caged tiger for a moment. The other agent was a mousy bureaucratic looking man in a suit, but the assault rifle, which Nik had never found out the model of but had only seen carried by the most combat-hardened members of his own agency marked him as just as dangerous as the woman. Then the man put his hand on Nik's shoulder, "You know her?"

In her cell, she tilted her head, cocking her ear toward the glass not even hiding that she was listening to them. Nik had no doubt she was. He had no doubt she could see them even through the glass - or at least their IR signatures - well enough to target them with the high powered laser pistol concealed in her prosthetic left arm. The weapon, like all her others, had been disabled, but the other implants couldn't be without effectively torturing her.

And Devlin Stone and the Precentor TerraSec, David Alsaice, who were holding the trials for the Word of Blake POWs and overseeing the treatment of the prisoners, both insisted there was to be no torture. They'd managed to get the rest of the Coalition to agree. Even the few Manei Domini that had been captured were being spared that.

Manei Domini like this one.

"Yes," he finally replied, "I know her."

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Being introduced to someone by having a gun shoved in your face usually didn't indicate the beginning of a lasting friendship.

Breaking into the dropship you used as a residence and mobile clinic and bleeding all over the floor usually weren't good signs either.

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Nik was known throughout the spy communities as a Refuge. Someone a wounded operative who couldn't get back to his or her home base could hide and get medical attention while the local situation cooled off. Someone double - or triple - agents could come to for a break or psychological counseling.

He never compromised his patients, hid them even from each other. He never asked questions. Refuges, it was known, worked for no one. They had no goal except to fulfill whatever oaths prompted them to offer sanctuary and healing to such dangerous men and women.

A fact he depended on to obscure his connections back to his superiors.

Over the course of his "career" since retiring from the Explorer Corps to become a wandering physician, Nik had treated agents from ISF, DEST, even one from the Nekakami, any number from the various MIIs, SAFE, WolfNet, both of the Lyran agencies, and the occasional Maskirovka. Introductions like the one with Autumn Mckinley weren't unusual. New patients, and some recurring ones, were more than slightly paranoid.

While he'd treated the gunshot wounds - still held at gunpoint himself - he'd tried to figure out who she was from.

He never asked his patients anything, but he was good at - had been trained at - identifying the agents that wound up on his doorstep by their habits and equipment.

She'd been wearing a combat MechWarrior suit and there'd been a sleek neurohelm within easy grabbing distance - a Clan model, but a number of those were available outside the Clans through Diamond Shark and they held up better in a firefight than the Inner Sphere models. The gun had been a KA-23 submachine gun, but they'd been on a Draconis world - if she were DEST, she wouldn't have come to him for treatment. Otherwise everything she'd had was of the highest quality, but generic.

She'd spoken perfect, unaccented english and he'd just concluded that she was most likely an MIIO agent of some flavor, when a sharp spike of pain had had her spitting out a vicious "Blake's mercy, be gentle!"

She'd been his first ROM patient. At that time he hadn't known which ROM.

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Sometimes, often, he only saw a patient once.

Not so Adept Mckinley. Over the next year and a half, she'd come to him twice more. Both times she'd been wounded. Both times she'd stayed long enough for some quick counseling. He'd swiftly concluded that she was a double agent. One slowly getting lost in her cover. Living the legend so completely, she was becoming it.

He'd helped her, as best he could, sharing the knowledge he'd gained from his years of providing a safe haven for dozens like her: pull out, but if you can't, decide, and decide quickly, how much of yourself you were willing to lose.

He never did find out who she ultimately worked for.

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He didn't see her again until 3071 - six years. The universe was coming apart at the seams, and everywhere was the terrible specter of the Word of Blake, who'd fired the first shots by nuking Tharkad City and bombarding Avalon City from space.

This time she'd appeared much as she had the first time, and obviously hanging onto consciousness by a thin thread. She'd cocked the gun, this one a very large autopistol, as he'd stepped forward. Her blue eyes had been more intense, almost fevered, than he'd ever before seen them. He'd stopped.

"I won't hurt you," he'd pitched his voice soothingly. "I just want to help you; you know that." He'd inched closer. "I'm not going to tell anyone you're here..." He'd stopped - her eyes had hardened and her hand twitched. She'd nearly shot him.

"You work," she'd stopped, leaned against the wall, gun never wavering. Took a deep breath. Nik's triage-trained ears had caught the sound of the sick gurgle. Her lungs had fluid in them. Considering the state of the rest of her, he'd concluded it was blood. Something in her shoulder had sent off small sparks. "You work for someone. I do-don't know who." Another painful sounding breath. "You can't tell them I was here."

He hadn't argued with her. "If that's true, what would make me agree to that?"

A few more seconds, he'd guessed, and she'd pass out on her own. Then he could get her on the surgery table and fulfill his first oath. _I swear by Apollo, the healer...*_

She'd fumbled with a pocket of her torn up piloting suit, exactly like the one he'd first seen her in, and cursed when a small data disk fell to the floor. She hadn't tried to pick it up. "That," she croaked. "Information, for your silence." She'd breathed through the fluid again. "Or I shoot you and we both die."

_She did not sound good_, he'd thought. She might not have made it if he'd let her pass out on her own. He'd needed to get her on the surgical table. "Fine," he'd agreed, "I won't tell."

"Your word," she'd snarled, gun beginning to shake.

"My word," he'd assured.

The gun had lowered and he'd had to rush to support her as she'd finally let herself collapse.

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Nik'd had patients with prosthetics before, and kept the equipment to repair them on hand.

But he'd never seen someone as extensively modified as Mckinley.

Manei Domini

Her sudden paranoia over her identity made sense then.

He'd spent nearly two hours repairing the damage to what was left of her organic body, then, after a rest, another twelve on the damaged prosthetics, before he'd gotten the chance to see what his devil's bargain had netted him.

Manei Domini activity and Shadow Division movements. Training, structure, the indoctrination recruits went through, some medical data. And a lexicon of the High Domini language.

This had been in one of his patients' things, he'd decided, a patient who'd died on the table in surgery. Tragic. But you couldn't save them all...

He certainly didn't know anything about a lithe, white-haired double agent, who'd been sleeping off a rather strong sedative in his recovering room.

But he never forgot. It was because of that meeting that he'd been watching the announcements of prominent Blakists killed or captured. It was because of that meeting, that he would, years again later, be standing outside a cell, watching her pace.

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It was the last he'd seen of her. Until today.

Two guards flanked the door of the cell. Both wore thick Swat armor and carried high-powered laser rifels - not the same model as the jailor's. The one on the right was bald and was tall and massive enough to be an Elemental. The other was shorter and had a vibroblade scar going down the side of his face, giving him a perpetually fierce expression. Between them the jailor went through the lengthy process of unlocking the cell door.

"Remember," the jailor sounded skeptical about letting Nik in there with such a dangerous prisoner, "her weapons and suicide switches," bombs, he meant - Nik had seen them during that last surgery, but hadn't dared remove them since she was returning to the ones who'd implanted them, "may have been disabled, but almost everything else is still functional and she's still dangerous."

Nik only glared at the other man as he stalked as best he could on his old bones into the room. His knowledge of what prosthetics she had may be out of date, but he knew what she'd had then. He was just a "Frail" by comparison - he didn't need more recent information to know that. But he was doing this anyway. The door hissed shut on it's powerful hydraulics behind him.

Sometimes, you never knew why, but some people just left a mark on you. The instant he'd read her name on the POW lists, he'd known he was going to try and save her.

Mckinley - Poltergeist Delta Autumn Mckinley, according to the only words she'd said to her questioners since her capture - was crouched as though ready to spring at him as he entered. She didn't though, and he waited as she slowly relaxed and stood.

The Manei Domini had been nightmares during the Jihad. Monsters. At the whim of their Master they'd committed atrocities with the same disregard for the lives of "Frails" as the average farmer on Kied showed towards hives of Vrikk. Even if no specific war crimes could have been definitively pinned on this individual, she would have been assumed to have participated in at least one of those attributed to the 49th Shadow Division, her unit. And he'd seen the list of charges that were being laid against her - she was known to have committed several crimes all on her own, as well as those of her unit. She had been as mysterious as the others, but for all that, less shy. As things stood currently, she was going to be executed.

"Stone's insisting," he began in slow, halting High Domini, "that if someone was a double agent during the Jihad, it be taken into account during their trial."

He'd always been good at languages.

If she was surprised though, she didn't show it, only giving him a scathing look as she resumed her pacing.

"You could be pardoned," he doubted it, but it was possible, "returned home," definitely, for her own government to hold her accountable for what she'd done in the name of keeping her cover.

She barked out a harsh laugh, then snarled. "Are you, then, my own personal ghost, come to convince me to return from despair?" Her eyes blazed, "'And shake it free of fear; Leaving pure her soul; And her duty clear,'* is that right?" Fast - faster than he'd ever seen anyone move - she'd sprung across the room and slammed him against the wall. "In case you have not noticed, Frail, I am a _Hand of the Master_. There is no returning from that."

Nik heard the door hiss open and the guards rushing in. She dropped him without a fight and allowed herself to be cuffed to the chair.

That would hold her, he mentally observed while he rubbed his bruised neck and assured the guards he was fine, exactly five seconds longer than she decided to let it.

He left the cell as solemn as he'd entered it. The jailor thought he'd failed at whatever he'd tried to do, but he was wrong. Because she'd finally slipped up and Nik had heard it: three lines of poetry. No doubt the bastardization of greek and latin they'd been speaking had completely ruined the sound and cadence, but the words...he'd found that piece of herself she hadn't let become consumed by her cover.

If he could find those words, he could find who she worked for.

And possibly save her life.

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**End**

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*The first line of the original Hippocratic Oath, as it was recited in the 5th century BCE. I don't mean to imply that the ancient form is the one used that far into the future, but it's been rewritten several times already, and one or more of the Star Nations probably did revert to some of the more archaic stylings.

**Clan Remembrance (Jade Falcon), Passage 8, Verse 36, Lines 64 - 66. From the Jade Falcon sourcebook. Since that book is an in-universe report by Comstar on the Clan, it's possible (if barely) for Nik to find that passage...


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